🦾The Impact of A.I. on Developer Productivity and Jobs

🤖 Is code in the process of going to the robots?

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

I’m not a software engineer, but I can tell you the sudden arrival of ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, Ghostwriter by Replit and others are changing things substantially. I wanted today Friday, to get out some rough thoughts about what I’ve been thinking.

The speed of A.I. is starting to impact the relative future of software engineers and a host of related demand for coding jobs.

If Generative AI tools hold promise to increase human productivity, perhaps nowhere is this more tangible in technology and innovation as in software engineering.

In a study, recruited software developers were asked to implement an HTTP server in JavaScript as quickly as possible. The treatment group, with access to an AI pair programmer (in this case GitHub Copilot), completed the task 55.8% faster than the control group.

In the massive tech layoffs we are seeing, Software engineers have not been spared, oddly they are among the worst hit groups. Read: Coders: Will A.I. Take your Job?

Coders: Will A.I. Take your Job?

Replit, formerly Repl.it, is a San Francisco-based start-up and an online integrated development environment.

I’ve been trying to keep tabs on Ghostwriter as best as I can. Even as Google is working frantically on their PaLM based GitHub Copilot competitor that we will likely learn more about at the I/O Conference in a couple of weeks, , Replit, the IDE startup developing a code-generating AI-powered tool called Ghostwriter, this week has now raised nearly $100 million ($97.4 million) at a $1.16 billion post-money valuation.

Now let me really go wild with where I see this going.